The Steve Jackson Laboratory

Welcome to the Steve Jackson Laboratory

our laB & our mission..

Our goal is to make transformative discoveries that will provide important new insights into physiological processes, particularly those that maintain genome and cellular integrity.

Where possible, we will also explore how such insights can be translated towards better understanding, diagnosing and/or treating human disease, especially cancer. We employ a diversity of advanced techniques in our studies, and have a strong track record of using them in innovative new ways as well as in developing and applying new experimental approaches, often in collaboration with other scientists.

By providing an interactive, cooperative and stimulating research environment that nurtures independent thinking, our group serves as an excellent platform for personal and professional development, with many of our past trainees having already gone on to have successful careers in academia, industry and other vocations.

Steve Jackson's group currently comprises nine post-docs including a bioinformatician, five PhD students, a lab manager, four research assistants, three technicians, an information specialist, and a secretary.

In vertebrate cells, the DNA damage response is controlled by three related kinases: ATM, ATR, and DNA-PK. It has been 20 years since the cloning of ATR, the last of the three to be identified. During this time, our understanding of how these kinases regulate DNA repair and associated events has grown profoundly, although major questions remain unanswered. Here, we provide a historical perspective of their discovery and discuss their established functions in sensing and responding to genotoxic stress.

The Y chromosome is frequently lost in hematopoietic cells, which represents the most common somatic alteration in men. However, the mechanisms that regulate mosaic loss of chromosome Y (mLOY), and its clinical relevance, are unknown. We used genotype-array-intensity data and sequence reads from 85,542 men to identify 19 genomic regions (P < 5 × 10-8) that are associated with mLOY.